Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 3:32 pm Post subject: video won't play in totem if any flash is being in browser

Hi guys,

I've been using gentoo for a few weeks now, and I'm completely in love with it. Compiling a kernel has never been so easy (compared to that on other distros

What I'm facing so far is regarding playing videos in totem (or any other software) when there's a flash loaded in the browser... totem tries to play the movie but it remains as if it had been paused (movie stays at time 00:00:00).

Do you guys have any clue on how to figure out what is causing this issue?

I wasn't able to reproduce your issue here with Gnome2 desktop, ATI fglrx video drivers and chromium browser. Totem is built with youtube USE flag by default (whatever that does). I can't reproduce it with another system using nvidia hardware and proprietary drivers either.

I see there's been a big recent change for media-libs/gstreamer (which Totem uses) from version 0.10 -> 1.0.5 with a higher version of Totem than stable, but I've not looked into details. I'm still using 0.10.36.

If the Alsa intagrated sound server Dmix is not active, each application who use Alsa lock the sound card until it finish. If Flash do that, it is possible that others applications have to wait for the sound and that can make a video stall. Did you configure Alsa to use Dmix in /etc/asound.conf or in ~/.aoundrc?

When Flash is down, can you play two sound files simultaneously with two differents applications that use both Alsa as output?_________________Paul

It is possible that Flash do not use the same audio output than Banshee and Totem. If you have Pulseaudio active, Banshee and Totem probably use it as audio output. If not, they probably use the default output playback card of Alsa.

With and /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc you can tell all your audio players, including Flash, which audio output they must use by default. So they will all use the same sound server, generally Dmix from Alsa or Pulseaudio. Than the sound output can be share between them.

Thanks again for your help.
After trying again and again I found the solution.
In the end I removed .asoundrc file and the only thing I had to do to get it working was to export FLASH_ALSA_DEVICE=plug:dmix and everything is okay now.

edit: actually the error was due to the 32bit flash plugin I used with ndiswrapper to work in Epiphany. If I remove that (and use only the 64bit version) everything works great (even without the FLASH_ALSA_DEV.... option).